Labour and Blair on fantasy island

The far-left of the Labour Party is not alone in being marooned on a “fantasy island”. Tony Blair was partially correct yesterday morning in his analysis of the failures of Corbynism – a mix of “far-left economic policy with deep hostility to Western foreign policy” was never going to appeal to patriotic working-class voters. Mr Blair, however, is an unabashed advocate for remaining in the European Union, and evidently wishes that his party would campaign on the same basis. How would that have gone down in the scores of northern Leave-voting seats that the Conservatives seized last week?

In truth, nobody within the Labour Party appears to have anything coherent to say about where it should go after its fourth straight general election defeat. Despite mouthing bromides about reuniting its various factions, the likes of Emily Thornberry and Sir Keir Starmer speak only for the socially liberal London middle classes in their narrow obsession with turning Labour into the party of Remain. So-called moderates like Lisa Nandy may have more sympathy towards Labour’s lost working-class voters, but they are fundamentally out of sync with a membership which values ideological purity over winning elections.

That membership is the reason why the party will probably prove incapable of conducting a proper post-mortem. A toxic mix of the old Left and younger “woke” social justice warriors, they have helped turn Labour into a depressing party of victimhood and resentment and are hardly going to listen to Mr Blair. Preaching a gospel of misery in which the poor live in Dickensian squalor while the rich evade their taxes, Labour is preoccupied entirely with metropolitan anxieties that leave much of the rest of the country cold. It no longer even pretends to understand the aspirations of working and middle-class voters – people who do not want class war, but who will vote for someone who can help them build a better life.

Labour’s leadership contest already appears to have descended into a sad battle over who can claim to be the most working class, as if such shallow and inauthentic posturing can distract from the fact that the party’s old coalition has fractured. Will Labour ever be able to escape from the mess Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership has landed it in? On current indications, it does not seem likely.